By my understanding of things, in the 50's, the civil rights movement was extremely tactical about where they choose to have boycotts and protests, actively targeting certain Southern communities and leaders that they knew would be particularly aggressive and, thus, particularly effective at mobilizing public moral sentiment to the movement's cause.

I'm not going to claim that what we're discussing here is on par with that, but was it sad that they had to game the system to effect change? Were they gaming the system? Or were they just confronting the reality of our politics and using that reality as a force for moral good in the world? Is that gaming, or is that grabbing reality firmly with both hands? I'm not being rhetorical here; I'm actually kind of wrestling with this myself.

I HATE politics. I have no stomach for it. But it does seem to me that it can't be escaped, that it is ultimately all there is, and that good peoples' resistant idealism often lets some pretty lousy people do whatever they want with, short term, nearly no consequences (and probably long term with a lot of massively destabilizing consequences that aren't really good for anyone).